Image made with elements from Canva. Let’s go back to grade school—do you remember learning about prime numbers? They’re numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one. So 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and ...

Math historian Peter S. Rudman suggests that Greek mathematicians were likely the first to understand the concept of prime numbers, around 500 B.C.E.

As is so often the case in mathematics, the conjecture falls into the category of those that are easy to understand but devilishly hard to prove. Twin primes are two prime numbers that have a ...

For instance, the largest known prime number, which is 2 136279841 − 1, is 41,024,320 digits long. At first, that number may seem mind-bogglingly large.

My InsiderPrimes are numbers that can only be evenly divided by themselves and 1. For example, 7 is a prime number since I'm left with a remainder or a fractional component if I divide 7 by ...

In school math class, you probably learned something called prime factorization, where you break a number down into a formula of primes. Let’s say the number is 100: that’s 25 times 4, or 5 ...

Amateur number detective Luke Durant (a researcher and former employee of the software company NVIDIA) recently found the biggest prime ever discovered: 2 136,279,841 -1, now also known as M136279841.

In some sense, the finding offers an infinite number of new definitions for what it means for numbers to be prime, Ono notes. At the heart of the team's strategy is a notion called integer partitions.

Mersenne primes are expressed through a formula: 2 P – 1, in which P is also a prime number. Pace’s discovery is only the 50th known Mersenne prime. It’s expressed as 2 77,232,917 – 1.

Math historian Peter S. Rudman suggests that Greek mathematicians were likely the first to understand the concept of prime numbers, around 500 B.C.E.